Wrecking Balls

There's a lot to like in this piece's analysis, which is the product of the 'daughter of a lesbian raised in an LBGT household.'

The “marriage equality” arguments leverage children.... Not a single same-sex couple can reproduce together. It behooves us to analyze the ways that same-sex marriage demands other people’s children as a “civil right” and in so doing invariably denies both women their own children and children their right to a mother and a father.

That's amazingly strong language, but it's not wrong if we are talking about children who become available for adoption by being 'taken away' rather than 'given up.' It turns out, we are talking about children like that.

These children are never the result of same-sex couples’ accidental pregnancy. In this case, nobody forced them to “adopt” children, so it seems a tad manipulative to use these children to back an argument for marriage. Juxtaposed alongside the description of bad mothers stands the worthiness of the plaintiffs.... [The dissent presents] the birthmothers as horrific... We hear it loud and clear: these mothers did not deserve their own children....

Who could have ever envisioned that the Fourteenth Amendment would become a tool to strip poor and minority women and their children of human rights? A decision from the bench that ignores the questions surrounding children’s rights betrays society’s animus toward women and the poor. Who exactly is being denied “due process” and “equal protection”?

Certainly not the people who have managed to field legal teams to defend their agenda against laws in nearly every state of the union, I expect. Most likely they're much more equal than the sort of people who have to default to public defenders, and who in civil cases must do their best to defend themselves.

Maybe So, Buster...

...but it's only your state that has its own FARK tag.

Nothing Suspicious Here

Headline: "Draft of Arrest Warrant for Argentine President Found at Dead Prosecutor’s Home."

The new revelation that Mr. Nisman had drafted arrest warrants for the president and the foreign minister further illustrates the heightened tensions between the prosecutor and the government before he was found dead on Jan. 18 at his apartment with a gunshot wound to his head. He had been scheduled the next day to provide details before Congress about his accusations against Mrs. Kirchner.

Philosophy Jokes

AVI posted a link to some philosophy jokes, which indicates that at least one of you might be interested in such things. The jokes are usually only funny if you know the philosopher's work (and then they sometimes are too obvious to really be amusing, though the Descartes joke is great).

Also, try this comic strip. It has occasionally done some excellent work.

A Long Piece on Nozick

This piece was written by a left-leaning author who doesn't see the irony in hitting Hayek and Mises for pushing libertarian ideas while being employed by corporate interests, but considering employees of publicly funded universities "disinterested academics." It strikes me that the complaint, insofar as it is valid, is just as valid on either side of the field.

Robert Nozick, though, can't be dismissed on that ground.

To the entire left, Nozick, in effect, said: Your social justice comes at an unacceptable cost, namely, to my personal liberty. Most distressingly, to this end Nozick enlisted the humanist's most cherished belief: the inviolability of each human being as an end unto himself—what Nozick, drawing on Immanuel Kant, calls "the separateness of persons." For Nozick, the principle of the separateness of persons is close to sacred. It affirms, as he writes, "the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means; they may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent. Individuals are inviolable."

...

To the liberal humanist, Nozick is saying: You don't take your finest hero, Kant, seriously, because if you did, you would never sacrifice Wilt's autonomy to the social planner's designs. To the socialist, he is saying: You don't take your own finest hero, Marx, seriously, because if you did, you would never expropriate his surplus value (via taxation) as blithely as the capitalist. And to his own fellow Harvard professors, he is saying: You don't take your own finest hero—yourself—seriously, because if you did, why would you ever curtail the prerogative of a superstar?

This is by way of taking his ideas seriously in order to criticize them. There's no surprise in learning that the author thinks that Nozick's ideas fail.

What is surprising is that, eventually, Nozick himself came to think so.

I should think so

The White House has made it plain how it feels about Israel, particularly on the subject of negotiations with Iran:

In the context of the anonymous White House threats, having a top Obama campaign official in Israel actively working to defeat Netanyahu is naturally perceived as interference.

The strategy isn't working all that well, though.

Netanyahu is not out of the woods, to be sure, but when it comes to campaigning against Barack Obama, this much is certain: He’s no Mitt Romney.

On Vaccinations

It's a fun day when two different Republican presidential candidates get themselves in trouble about science. We've all heard the stories, Rand. That's why there's an issue. The question is not whether there are stories, but what you would advise to parents.

So here's what I think.

1) As a gambling man, I notice that lots and lots of people get these vaccinations, and almost none of them are the source of scary stories. The diseases seem to have much worse outcomes on average. So, a smart gambler takes the vaccine.

2) As an anecdote, I myself have been vaccinated against just about everything, and I'm just fine. I've even had vaccines for anthrax, small pox, and third world diseases that won't come across your desk unless you travel widely.

3) Furthermore, all the medical professionals I know -- including my favorite cousin -- tell me that they are aware of no evidence that these things are dangerous, and strongly recommend administering vaccinations to your children.

4) Meanwhile, not only will you be protecting your child if the vaccination works successfully, you'll be doing a good deed for other parents of other children as well. These things work much better if we all do it.

Now the fun part.

5) As a philosopher, I can tell you that the strongest argument is the argument from gambling. There's a lot of empirical evidence about outcomes. You're placing a wager of a sort, with your child's life and health as the stakes. If you view this as a wager, it's pretty clear what the smart bet is.

All the other arguments are suspect. My anecdote is of no use to you, because anecdotes are not data and your child's body chemistry is not the same as mine. In fact, even if we get to data, you still get no promises. Cabbage is widely administered to the population. Almost no one has any problem with it. My wife happens to be allergic to it. Weird body chemistry things happen all the time.

The appeal to medical professionals and scientists is an appeal to authority, which is an informal fallacy. This is their area of expertise, which makes it less dangerous, but it's still no guarantee of truth. The fact is that the best they can tell you is that they have no evidence, yet, of any connection. That's an argument from ignorance, which is another informal fallacy.

The final argument is an appeal to ethics, but ethics doesn't have a lot of clear objective standards. The only place you find objective standards in ethics is virtue ethics. You can show that courage is objectively a virtue, because no matter what your goals are, being courageous will (always or for the most part, as Aristotle says) help you achieve them. Vaccination is a virtue on this account: always or for the most part, it will lead to the best outcomes for your child. Vaccination is the virtuous thing to do just because it passes the gambler's test.

The ethical argument that you should take the risk to help other peoples' children, however, is suspect. It's not clear that there's a virtue involved in risking your child to save other peoples' children. Any claim that there's any sort of duty to do it is not objective: now we've left virtue ethics for what is called "Deontology," and nobody really agrees about what roots duties. It is not clear to me how you would ground any duty that required a parent to risk their child's life or health for any reason.

So, what should you do? Vaccinate your children. It's virtuous, and it's the smart bet. Don't let anyone tell you that it's not a risk, though, or that you're stupid for worrying about it. There's still a lot we don't know.

UPDATE: Speaking of Republicans seeking the nomination, Dr. Carson is a pediatric surgeon by training and his opinion is to vaccinate.

Joltin' Joe Rides Again!

The US is behind the attempted coup in Venezuela – that is the accusation President Nicolas Maduro has leveled amid widespread protests back home. And it’s none other than Vice-president Joe Biden who’s behind the entire operation, Maduro alleges.

Masada Wins

For thousands of years, the date palm was a staple crop in the Kingdom of Judea, as it was a source of food, shelter and shade. Thick forests of the palms towering up to 80 feet and spreading for 7 miles covered the Jordan River valley from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the shores of the Dead Sea in the south.

So valued was the tree that it became a recognized as a symbol of good fortune in Judea. It is chronicled in the Bible, Quran and ancient literature for its diverse powers, from an aphrodisiac to a contraceptive, and as a cure for a wide range of diseases including cancer, malaria and toothache.

However, its value was also the source of its demise and eventual extinction. The tree so defined the local economy that it became a prime resource for the invading Roman army to destroy. Once the Roman Empire took control of the kingdom in 70 AD, the date palms were destroyed in an attempt to cripple the Jewish economy. They eventually succeeded and by 500 AD the once plentiful palm had completely disappeared, driven to extinction for the sake of conquest.

But all was not lost, because in 1963, the late archeologist Yigael Yadin began excavating Masada, a mountaintop fortress built over 2,000 years ago on the shore of the Dead Sea where King Herod built a spectacular palace. Masada was the last stand of a small band of Jewish rebels who held out against three Roman legions for several years before committing mass suicide in A.D. 73.

Buried beneath the rubble, Yadin unearthed a small stockpile of seeds stowed in a clay jar dating back 2,000 years.

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. The Roman Legions are long dust but today in a reborn Israel, Masada's seeds are growing again.

Audacity

Debaun was accused of not providing the information to a male sexual partner. But Debaun’s attorney persuaded a circuit judge to dismiss the charge, arguing that state law and courts have defined sexual intercourse as being between men and women — not between men.

I'm pretty sure that's not true, but even if it were it would take a lot of guts for the lawyer of gay man to make that argument before an American court these days!

Vagueness

Vagueness is an interesting problem in philosophy. It's a much less pleasant problem in the law.

Upon initial contact with the Texas Department of Public Safety, a spokesperson stated that the new law would “not be interpreted by just one agency; each agency may interpret it differently.”

Speaking of vagueness, is that 'may' as in might or 'may' as have full permission to do so at will?

On Class

Sarah Hoyt writes about the academic class' pretensions of superiority to the manual laborers of the world. She describes a cheap, working class playground she used to attend with her family, where she would ignore the rides and read books.

It was a safe and fun place for the kids and – remember I understand Spanish, too – not once did anyone say “Hey, look at the dork chick reading a book,” much less “let’s beat her up.”

In fact, it wasn’t till we could afford as a treat, to go to Waterworld, a playground for children in our own “class” in terms of parental education that we found people were rude and made horrible remarks. (Not unexpected in feral children raised mostly in daycares, but a shock, nonetheless.)

One of the things I think the educated class is blind about is how much they do the things they have developed theories to reject. I attended a conference once at which the question of veterans in the classroom came up. Mostly the academics there who were prone to think of war as something so outside the world they could imagine for themselves that anyone who had been must be changed beyond what they could imagine a human being to be. Two of them especially, both of them feminist academics, traded in bald stereotypes about how anyone who had been to war was a ticking time bomb of PTSD and hate. It was exactly the kind of refusal to empathize with and offensive stereotyping of the 'other' that they've doubtless published articles about when the 'other' is women or people of color. These are people who think of themselves as at the forefront of human morality, the leading edge that is pushing everyone else to moral advancement.

They were entirely blind to the fact that they were doing it. They were also shocked to realize that someone who had been to Iraq was in the room, and entirely put off by my suggestion that younger academics who really wanted to understand war could find a recruiting office down the street. You'd think I had suggested they join a cult or host an orgy... well, actually, both of those suggestions would probably have been more palatable to them.

Candlemas

This is one of the "-mas" days Malory mentions occasionally, and until today I didn't know when it was. Apparently it falls on 2 February, "exactly 40 days after Christmas." The date has to do with a Jewish ritual of purification for new mothers and the first presentation of their children at the Temple in Jerusalem. This was to happen forty days after the birth, so this would be the date if we are right about the date of Christmas.

So that's something I didn't know until this morning.

Small Pipes

On Plastic Surgery

This piece from the UK's Daily Mail shows that the left's "war on women" shtick isn't limited to the United States or to condemnations of the Republican party. The game is to suggest that conservatives in general just don't "get" women. Notice, though, how much of the effect is achieved by shifting from "can be" to "is." The headline says that plastic surgery "is" condemned, but the argument in the working paper is that it "can be" symptomatic of a problem.

In the Pontifical Council for Culture's working paper, cardinals noted that going under the knife for elective surgery has been linked to eating disorders and depression.

'Plastic surgery that is not medico-therapeutic can be aggressive toward the feminine identity, showing a refusal of the body in as much as it is a refusal of the 'season' that is being lived out,' it said.

Again failing to understand the difference between a government and a church, the suggestion is that women will be forbidden from doing what they want with their bodies. The actuality is that the council is trying to understand the ways in which the culture is creating or worsening problems for women in Catholic parishes. All they are going to do with this argument is offer it as a way of saying to older women, "It's OK to be who you are."

The failure to understand this is behind their attacks on the Vatican's advertisement, too, I think. There's no reason to make an issue of whether the woman in the ad is old or young. Painting her as "sexy" is out of line; it's not like she's wearing "sexy" attire. She's a Catholic, and a woman who wanted to talk to other women about these cultural issues. Somehow she's not allowed to do that because she's the wrong shape to be taken seriously.

St. Brigid's Day

The beginning of Spring comes in late March according to our calendar, but of old in Ireland it was the first of February that marked the beginning of the coming of Spring. It was a feast, Imbolc, before it became a Christian feast day. This hymn in Gaelic is from the 11th century, in honor of St. Brigid, one of those early saints who is possibly a historical abbess, and possibly a goddess.

Parliamentary Comity

That's how they do it in England.

Nice Essay

It begins:

Dear King,

It is sad that you died of natural causes.

It's got a pretty good last line, too.

The long battle

Also via ChicagoBoyz, a Veronique de Rugy plea for patience in fighting the battle for big ideas.

Viking revival

From ChicagoBoyz, news of a "Late Varangian/Kievan Rus/Viking" revival in the Ukraine.